The Significance of Parameters Used for Self-Organized Tectonic Zoning of Iran

The Iranian plateau is one of the active tectonic regions on the earth. Non-uniformly distribution of deformation and repetitive activity of faults have cause a complex pattern of tectonic and seismotectonic activity of Iran. Therefore, in order to study the seismic and geological behaviors of different parts of the country one has to perform tectonic and seismotectonic zoning. Tectonic and seismotectonic zoning of Iran began by conventional methods in the past and developed by numerical zoning in recent years. Conventional methods arent capable for producing detailed zoning maps. Recently numerical data and statistical and mathematical models have used for produce modern numerical maps. The advantage of numerical pattern recognition is that this method is a powerful tool for objective interpretation of massive of data. Multivariate statistical methods not only apply for tectonic zoning, but also this is useful to reveal the degree of significance and relationship between effective variables on tectonic zoning. In this paper, a large numbers of up-to-date geophysical, seismological, geological and geomorphological data have analyzed by using multivariate statistical methods to produced self-organized numerical tectonic and seismotectonic zoning of Iran. Based on this techniques a seven zoning tectonic and seismotectonic map has constructed for Iran. The role and significance of various parameters have also investigated using ANOVA method. The results indicate that some of the parameters play more important role in self-organized zoning. Based on relationships between parameters, they are been classified into 12 groups. Variables in each group present maximum correlation with each other. It is interesting to note that despite the frequent application of a- and b- values of the Gutenberg Richter magnitude frequency formula, these values show poor correlation with others and do not play a significant role in zoning.